


Time To Gather Up The Splinters

by amoama



Category: teen wolf - Fandom
Genre: Derek Has Issues, Derek POV, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoama/pseuds/amoama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Being born with the wolf is different to being bitten. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time To Gather Up The Splinters

**Author's Note:**

> So much love and thanks to Lilithilien for beta-ing.

Being born with the wolf is different to being bitten. You learn control, to harness, and then _unleash_ ; you learn not to fear or deny the wolf.

You are whelped, trained, _raised_ as both man and animal together. You wean both, feed both, teach both. You learn to define sensation, scent, heartbeat and footprint as you learn your ABCs.

The first time you stand outside your 5th grade homeroom and know who’s present and who’s absent before you enter the room, you feel a rush of pleasure through both boy and cub. Pride from your human side, “right” from the wolf. The latter’s feelings are simpler, clearer. If something is right or wrong, then the wolf knows how to act. When things are not black and white, then the wolf is uneasy, pacing and fretting in your veins. Unease is unsure is unable to act. The wolf must wait, condescend to the human, _wanting_ for an answer.

Sometimes Derek stands still in his human body and just lets the wolf run through him. The only control he keeps is for his body; he lets his mind clear, gives up his space to the sense and feeling of the wolf.

He knows it intimidates people to see him this way - so outwardly still, so inwardly animal. He thinks they can sense the predator on the inside.

He lets the wolf smell and feel and see, subdues his thoughts, gives no inner ~human~ narrative to what the wolf sees.

The world is not simpler this way, but his mind is, and his heart beats unimpeded by the guilt that lives in the man.

He smells coffee and prickling sweat and nerves. He hears a heart murmur and sees flesh corrupting in front of him. The wolf is unforgiving, offers none of the excuses a man might. The urge to run, test the strong muscles of his own heart, rolls through him, so he lets the wolf go and feels his human body fly, covering distance faster than a man ever could, the energy of the wolf coursing through him, heart expanding to keep up with his pace. 

The wolf naturally runs towards what smells most pleasant to him, freshest, sharpest; the place that calls the strongest. Derek doesn’t let himself wonder where he’s heading, or why. The wolf is happy and pushy and expectant. It is not expecting to be held back from what it wants because doesn’t it always want what the man wants? The timing may not always be immediate, the wolf is used to that, and he bows to accommodate the man’s knowledge of the human world that the wolf doesn’t understand; but always, sooner or later, they come together. They are after all part of a whole.

For reasons unknown (unexplored) the wolf’s happy place is usually roundabouts where Stiles is. The wolf feels “right”; it also feels excited, like the anticipation of a chase. The wolf practically pants inside Derek. It sits within him trying to infect Derek with its eagerness, certain that Derek will act how the wolf wants him to. 

The thing about Stiles is that he doesn’t let you stay hidden when he’s around. You can’t let the wolf cover you when Stiles is expecting you to be following his thought process. Stiles twists and turns and deviates round every sentence. He struggles for the best way to describe things; if he halts it’s because he’s searching for a good way to express something to you. It’s exhausting, but Derek finds he sticks around for it. If he disappears, even for an instant, it’s like Stiles comes knocking. His instant, demanding “Derek!” forces him to engage again. 

It makes Derek more alert, closer to the surface than he likes to be. Some days it feels like the wolf wants to expel Derek out of his own skin, towards Stiles. Derek frowns against the wolf, tests the harness, checking his control like he hasn’t done in years, because suddenly he feels more present, more sensitised, than he can remember feeling. So he stays in his body around Stiles, owns it. And because he was born a wolf, he doesn’t think to stop the wolf’s happiness seeping quietly into him. The wolf is as much a part of him as anything else. The wolf grins at the man, from within him, smirking, and the man frowns back and tries to pretend he doesn’t know what’s coming. 

If you’re fighting your wolf, then you’re at war with your whole self, with how you were born, with what you’ve become. Maybe that’s what you should be doing; maybe who you are needs to be fought. But Derek’s rarely thought that about himself. 

He was loved, protected, believed in. Until he wasn’t. 

He’s mistaken his wolf before, felt excitement and challenge and bloodlust and thought it was something else. The elation of battle, the call of the wild, in the heat of adolescence it can be intoxicating. Kate was all that. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t... this. Man and wolf have been swept along before, eyes on the prize, no cover for the blind spot. Chasing, chasing. 

He holds himself back from Stiles, keeping the wolf in check. Who is this boy? Such a thoughtless, clattering child, mouth agog, mouth, mouth... Everything about him is so... _open..._ and the wolf knows it too. Disingenuous, willing, excited, hungry for knowledge and experience. All the things Derek can give him. 

Just once, Derek looks at Stiles with the wolf’s eyes. Burning red lenses intensify the view, vividly showing the heat of Stiles’ body. The wolf urges him forward - it’s like Derek’s fighting his own limbs to hold himself still. The wolf pines with frustration, so close to ‘right.’ It sends image after image of desperate, carnal rutting through the man’s brain, until he can barely breathe with focusing on restraining himself. His forehead creases, furrowed in concentration… 

“Dude, do you, like, _need_ to be looking at me like that right now?” Stiles’ voice cuts through the wolf’s dominance. Stiles is speaking to the man; the wolf instinctively makes room for the words to filter through, he’s not _that_ far gone, and besides they were raised together. This is how they work. 

Derek pulls himself forwards, dazed. That was a dangerous experiment. No more wolf-time around Stiles, it seems. He doesn’t know how he was looking, he just knows Stiles’s reaction: fearful, aroused, confronting. 

Derek’s always been proud of his control. He knows the wolf’s feelings are his feelings amplified, and he knows he cannot repress its nature. What the wolf desires, the man will never be able to resist. Derek knows desire, knows impatience, knows burning, screaming, want. And he knows it as he’s faced with a goofy 16-year-old with more limbs then he knows what to do with. Derek’s hands clench but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t deny what the wolf is feeling, what the man feels too, but he doesn’t let it out either. 

 

The relationship between Stiles and Scott is odd. Derek doesn’t get it. He supposes that it’s nice having someone around that you’ve always known; who however much he rolls his eyes or interrupts you, you know he’ll still be there tomorrow flicking pen lids at you across the table. A friend you can say whatever in front of and they’re not going to go running. Stiles and Scott seem to use each other to test out the limits of their individual and combined stupidity. They communicate on a sub-verbal level mostly, half-words and old references and flailing hand gestures. Derek supposes you don’t walk away from that. Not in a small town, and not anywhere if you can help it. 

When he watches them he feels more alone than ever. He’s a werewolf. Sub-verbal is his area of expertise, he has a wealth of short-hand at his disposal, but there’s no one to communicate with. It’s too late for him to have “known you forever” people. That’s what it feels like anyway. 

There’s just his uncle. 

Derek sees the boys together and he feels all his bitterness stir within him, jealous and angry. Pissed that these two idiots who he would never want to be like in a million years have what he can never have. The wolf feels it too because for him it’s pack: brothers to challenge you, to fight with you, to know you. A pack whose instincts are in sync with your own, who feel your pain and your weariness and compensate with their own strengths. Derek knows what it is to be torn from that; he’s spent years away from Laura and even Peter, trying to ignore its importance. But just watching these two fools with their endless back and forth, getting each other into ridiculous amounts of trouble and covering for each other even when the whole town knows they were in it together - these two make him remember _pack_ like the vivid, vital, irreplaceable _home_ it was. 

Derek tries not to think about Laura. His sister, his alpha. How desolate her pack had been. An uncle, comatose and paralysed. A brother, shutting himself down, locking himself away. He’s had more in common with Peter than he wants to admit. And Laura, standing alone on the ashes of their family, eyes burning, fully transformed, howling desperately for her absent pack. Derek can still hear those howls if he shuts his eyes and concentrates. The frustrated commands reverberate round his head, but they hold no power over him now; it’s merely an echo with no pull behind it. 

They had been everything to each other; they had been nothing to each other. They both took refuge in their wolves, and even the pain of the wolves, strong and intense though it was, was clearer and simpler. It felt more possible to outrun it. So they tried. Beat a path through every forest and mountain in their way, ranged further and further apart. Tested the limits of their bond. Howled to each other in the darkness. When they met up, often they fought, hackles up, teeth barred. Ripped each other to shreds, bleeding and healing and bleeding again. 

When there are so many who can’t get up and watch their wounds close over, who can’t feel the sinew reforming underneath, then the miracle of the healing starts to feel traitorous. So you claw at the scars before they can disappear, and keep clawing and try to take your body to the edge, ask of it over and over again. If you can do this, why are they gone? 

Once, in the softness of the new moon, after fighting for days, Laura had sat down next to him and held his hands firm, away from his body. Using her wolf to make Derek retract his claws, she leaned over him, transfixed, and she licked up his arm over the worst of the cuts, healing them instantly. Even now, the thought of it still makes Derek shudder all over because it was then that he realised the depth of Kate’s deception, the extent of what she had sought to take from him. His Alpha’s gesture of healing mirrored how Kate had touched him, pleasured him, taken from him. For Derek it wasn’t a gesture of love or cleansing, but one of betrayal and mockery. And suddenly he knew there was no comfort for him.

Derek had run that night, further than before, far out of their territory. He sunk himself into a freezing cold river and kept his head under water as long as possible, forcing himself to withstand the pain. He wanted to be clean, he wanted to be lost, to be buried, to be forgotten. He wanted to emerge from his nightmare when he rose from the swirling water. He wanted to be deaf to all sounds, not to hear the cries from Laura, whining, begging him, but not dictating. 

He surfaced down river, washed onto a bank. Laura was standing over him. He’d looked at her and told her clearly, despite the chattering of his teeth and the shaking of his body, “You can’t touch me like that, ever.” 

And it was a plea that he made in the depths of his guilt and regret and grief. But it was one that she honoured, doing so for far longer than she should have. She was just a child too. An alpha too young to know better - too scarred herself to overrule his grief. 

From that moment, pack wasn’t home anymore. 

Derek’s new grief over Laura’s death is tinged with guilt once again. He was her beta, her one lieutenant. She never turned anyone else to fill the gaping loss that made up the rest of her pack. Derek was all she had, and when he walked away, she let him go and didn’t ask for anything again. He should have been around to back her up. 

Her death leaves him alone in a way he’s never been before. Despite their distance, they were always connected. In the back of his mind he always knew she was there. If she howled, he would come running. The faint buzz of pack, however weak, persisted in the wake of all their losses. But now, without her, when he was too far away to help as she roared her death-cry, he returns to his home-town, to the wreckage of their lives that Laura could not rebuild. He has nothing, no one. How many times has he visited his uncle, stared into his eyes, holding his breath in the hope of one moment of recognition? Eventually he stops going. He’s as alone as Peter is in his shell. 

The wolf feels it too. It howls over Laura’s body, keens inwardly as her remains are lowered into the earth, bound by the wolf’s bane. Part of him wants to seek out the Alpha, offer himself up as part of the pack, to end the silence inside him that feels like weakness. The greater part wants to rip whoever it is limb from limb. They killed his sister; they have stripped him of his inheritance. The wolf is finally finding its voice again as they stand over Laura’s grave, outside their old home. The wolf wants what he’s owed, what’s his. His pack’s out there, waiting. He wants to be the Alpha, to draw them together. He wants to take his revenge, shrug off this crushing guilt and silence and be strong and whole again. The wolf wants what Derek wants, but to Derek it just feels like he finally wants something again.

It’s an awakening. In the ashes (and dust) of his old house, it feels appropriate. It’s time at last. 

It is in the shadow of his former home that he takes his revenge finally, on Kate, on Peter, old crimes and new, their blood soaking into the ground where his family died, retribution and return. It is fitting. 

Derek takes the power into himself. Alpha. Strength ripples through him and the wolf glories in him. He can do anything, he can take what he wants. In one giddy moment the wave of want that runs through Derek is focused purely on Stiles. He feels his mouth water, his teeth gnash. He could just take, make his pack how he wants it. Then he sees Stiles running to Scott, knows Stiles already has a home and a family. He doesn’t need the pack. He howls anew, a waking cry. Derek’s pack is out there, he wants them to know he’s coming for them. They need him and they’re waiting for him. 

For Derek, it’s all about need. He bites the ones that he senses have that same aching loneliness inside them that he has. This is what he needs the pack for; he wants them to need it, need him, in the same way. This is how he can tie them together. As the Alpha, he wants people, wolves, he can be everything to. 

The first bite doesn’t take. Derek can feel it, tries not to let the sense of failure filter into him. The wolf feels merely affronted. He doesn’t understand exactly what’s happening to Jackson, he can’t get answers for him and the responsibility weighs on him. He bites the others quickly, before he convinces himself that he’s not a strong enough Alpha. Even before they say yes, he knows they’re going to, he knows they need him. He feels the power of it, the beauty of what they’ll be, the promise of a connection and an acceptance they’ve never experienced before. He wants them. It’s not consent he gets from them, its desire. It’s enough for him. 

Derek didn’t have a choice. He was born who he is, with this inside him. He is the wolf. He can fight it or he can accept it. He lives it. And this is what the wolf wants, so Derek takes it, Isaac, Erica, Boyd. 

Derek goes from not knowing them to ruling their lives. He lets his hold over them empower him. It feels like the edge of the abyss. Four strangers suddenly tied to each other. The young wolves inside the teenagers strain to assert themselves, vie for dominance. The bond between them all is fragile, trembling at the beginning of existence. Four people who have been so alone for so long, surviving in their own ways, half shut-down, living inside themselves. Now the wolves fill them, pushing them out of themselves. Belatedly Derek realises the magnitude of what he has done, who he has chosen. Somehow he wants to hide from them how much he needs them. He senses they feel the same, unwilling to trust this new togetherness. 

The fact is, if Scott’s in his pack, so is Stiles. Scott brings his family with him. Derek knows it as much as the wolf does; the only thing he tries to deny to himself is how big a part that is of his determination to get Scott to join him. There are other reasons, better reasons. Or at least, more easily defined reasons. Reasons that don’t include Derek admitting that the pack benefits from having Stiles around; that this awkward, fool-hardy kid has the most empathetic and resourceful nature Derek has ever encountered. His pack is made up of kids, brittle, half-broken, had-to-grow-up-too-soon kids. Although he sometimes thinks of himself like that, he still doesn’t know quite how to relate to them most of the time. He doesn’t have half the answers they need from him. Sometimes it seems like Stiles might. 

But he makes the wolf too happy and Derek doesn’t trust that. 

Derek won’t make the mistake of trusting it. 

His uncle comes back and Derek tries to keep hating him but it feels too much like a gift. Peter rises from the floorboard of the old house – from amongst the ghosts, and Derek can’t help hoping that others could follow. It seems like Peter looks around once and sees everything: the crumbling pack, the misplaced bite, Scott, Stiles. Peter rolls his eyes a lot and makes out like it’s all so beneath him, which, probably it is, but right now Derek can’t see any other reason why his uncle’s back. 

Stiles finds him one night in August. He’s been training Jackson and Isaac all day and its hell. Peter leans against trees and smirks while Derek tries to get them to use all their senses and respond instinctively. It’s all about trusting their wolves. It’s rich coming from Derek, whose wolf is currently alert within him, forcing him to smile in greeting as Stiles approaches, even as Derek frowns at his own lack of control.

Stiles notices. “No really, what is with your face?” 

Except there’s an odd kick of Stiles’ heartbeat at the end of his question that Derek can’t quite decode. The werewolf sense needed to decipher a Stilinksi was clearly above his parent’s paygrade. Or maybe he would have got there if they’d lived to teach him. 

“What are you doing here, Stiles?”

“Just checking in. You know, on weretivity and wolf/hunter relations and all that. An exchange of information - think of me as an envoy from humankind. An ambassador, if you will. Now that I’m not grounded anymore, I mean.”

Stiles pauses for breath, and Derek uses the time to raise an eyebrow. There doesn’t seem much point in trying to interrupt his flow yet. 

“Isaac told Scott you’re training them hard? Jackson too? Is he around? Because I haven’t seen Lydia all summer, although, like I said, grounded. But still. Jackson’s been here?” 

Derek just nods. He’s stalked forwards rather a lot, he notices belatedly, but Stiles doesn’t seem to be aware. He’s definitely not perceiving any kind of a threat. Stiles just looks at him, big eyes blazing defiance, and Derek knows he’s a goner. Knows that he’s going to take his own advice for once and trust the wolf.

In the end Stiles is kind of calm about it, not like Derek was expecting. Stiles just sighs a little into it, as if conceding something he hadn’t really wanted to, and curls his arms around Derek’s waist, pulling him the rest of the way in. 

Derek doesn’t want to think about how gleeful and fricking jubilant his wolf is right now. It’s so dangerous to be doing this, to be giving in to it, but Stiles’s body feels so sturdy and warm against his that the thought of all the trouble on the horizon starts to melt away. 

The long, slow kisses finally dissolve and Stiles breaks away slightly. The look in his eyes as he stares at Derek is kind of hard to look into; it’s a bit too reproachful. Stiles rests his head on Derek’s shoulder, nudging into his neck. He reaches a hand up to pet Derek’s cheek and runs his thumb along the jaw line. 

“This is it then,” Stiles says, finally. And it’s so full of meaning that it ends up just being a simple statement. 

“Yes,” Derek agrees. Admitting it to himself as well. Because neither of them have turned out to have much choice in the matter and a lot of plans and preconceptions about their lives are going to go by the wayside because of this. 

If the wolf had human words, it would probably be shouting, “Bring it!” Leaping around, throwing itself on Stiles, nipping at his pale skin, daring the rest of the world to come try to destroy this. But Derek knows how to keep a lid on it, mostly, knows not to get too excited about the idea of escaping outside forces. It’s not liked that’s ever worked before. He holds onto Stiles that tiny bit tighter. Not letting him get away is pretty much as far as Derek’s willing to think into the future. That’s the only part of the plan he’s at all confident about. He walks Stiles backwards to the wall, trapping him with his arms, just for the satisfaction of knowing he has one less escape route. 

Stiles whispers, “Seriously?” like he knows Derek’s plan and really doesn’t think much of it, but Derek kisses him so they don’t have to have this conversation. 

Stiles kisses back, so it’s probably not his priority right now either.


End file.
